<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>gravity and all the dogs by anyder</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26275261">gravity and all the dogs</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/anyder/pseuds/anyder'>anyder</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Final Fantasy XIV</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Backstory, FFxivWrite, FFxivWrite 2020, Gen, Ishgard (Final Fantasy XIV), Pre-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 06:08:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,585</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26275261</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/anyder/pseuds/anyder</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Entry for FFXIVWrite 2020, under the prompt "Sway".</p><p>It was far from what I expected. He seemed angry with me--like a hound! My brother had told me of the logger's dog, and how its leg was hurt in the summer. He said it breathed with a rage if anyone came too close. It didn't yowl or growl, but come within two yalms of it and it radiated anger. No one could come near it until its leg had gotten better. I understood my brother's story, now, in meeting this boy. </p><p>"I saw you fall," I said.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>gravity and all the dogs</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was before the snows. It was winter, and it was snowing, but it was back when winter snow would melt. We had spring to look toward, and summer beyond that, and then we had autumn through which to prepare for one more winter. Drudgery. We had no idea that we were taking the seasons for granted.</p><p>So it was before the Calamity, when I saw this. Years before it. I was hardly a boy. I was good for little more than fetch, and here at dusk, I was fetching. I remember what my arms were full of only because I remember the consequence of dropping it, and the uneven clattering as it scattered across cobblestone and snow: simple kindling. My older brother had done chores for a logger, and I was picking up the payment. Dry wood, good for our hearth. We would huddle around it. We would sleep in a pile on a scattering of hay.</p><p>Nearly half the kindling didn't clatter upon cobblestones; that's what landed in the snow. I realized it too slowly, first noticing my own empty arms, then looking down to see what was happened. <em>Kindling in the snow.</em> I cussed to myself, and I'd have gotten walloped for that if there were anyone around, but there was no one else--and anyway, I cussed because I knew I had a wallop coming. Kindling in the snow meant kindling getting damp, and in my haste to snatch it all back up, I was clumsy about it. I fumbled to get everything back into my arms.</p><p>Then I had to weigh my options. I really was a scale, shifting from foot to foot. The right foot was this: run straight home, try to offset the wet wood with how fast I'd been at bringing it. Accept the walloping, take it on the chin, and that would be that. But then the left foot: I could go toward what I'd just seen. The thing that made me drop the wood I'd fetched. I reasoned with myself that I could, perhaps, get it mostly dry if I held it close to my body for a while, and that might be worth getting home late. Most of all, I was but a boy and I was terribly curious. Of course I chose the left foot, the left tipping of the scale. I hurried toward what I had seen.</p><p>It was a child, I thought.</p><p>It had to have been a child. Who else would be so small? My size, maybe, though the figure was so far away, it was hard to truly tell. But the shape had been small and thin, and the legs looked longer than mine. Probably an Elezen. Maybe a little older than me. A Hyur what's hardly a boy could be of a size with Elezen lads. So let's say it was one of those, an Elezen lad--this is the discussion I had with myself whilst I hurried. I had been walking down the lane when I chanced to look up at some of the buildings. Then I saw the shape scurrying up toward a spire. <em>Toward</em> it, not to it. He was having trouble. He'd made it up onto the buttress of a building, and I remember thinking that he could have run along it if he wanted to go higher. But he looked to be trying to leap.</p><p>What I won't forget is the pleasure I felt at watching him try and fail. I was young enough, in a house full of brothers on a lane full of lads, that I rarely got to feel derision toward anyone else. I was just about the bottom rung, and I warranted little pride or self-satisfaction. But this Elezen lad toward the spire--I could look at him and think, with novel haughtiness, <em>What's he at? Does he think he's a dragoon?</em> It was foolish to pantomime them, because they were the best among us and we could hardly fathom what it was like to be them.</p><p>He made it all the way up.</p><p>I was testing out what it felt like to be smug at his stupidity when he backed up to the very edge of the buttress--another ilm and he'd have fallen backward--before he ran himself forward and pushed himself <em>up</em> into the greatest leap I'd ever seen out of a body so small. I didn't think he'd stick the landing. But he caught the spire with his hand, and though his feet scrabbled to make purchase, they succeeded. He'd succeeded. He stood at the base of that spire, so small and far away, with the elegant line of his leg leading seamlessly into the elegant line of his back. He stood like a dragoon. He was shaped like a man and I felt ashamed of myself for thinking he was less than that.</p><p>It could have been a sudden wind, or he could have placed his foot wrong. But I watched his victory and then I watched him sway in place. And then I watched him fall. That is when I dropped my family's kindling. He teetered, lost his grip on the spire, and pitched to the side so quickly that he had no hope of catching himself. He fell all the way off of the building. So my errand fell onto the stones and into the snow, I snatched it back up, and I ran in that direction.</p><p>If the lad hadn't died, I thought to myself, he'd be dead by the time I found him--if I could find him at all! It had grown darker than dusk, and I could not tell where he had fallen. I was taking too long, and it was going to kill him. That's what frightened me. When I came round to the back of the building with the spire, I thought he couldn't have fallen there either; I didn't see his body. But the white snow remained visible in the coming nightfall, so what splashed atop it caught my eye: a red speckling of blood.</p><p>I started to pray.</p><p>He had tucked himself into a space too small to be an alley, a little crevice where one building had been misaligned with another. It wasn't easy to find him, but the blood had convinced me he had to be nearby, so I looked and looked, until, at last, there he was. An Elezen lad, like I had thought. His hair was not so different from the snow: white, dirty, flecked with his blood. He glared at me, sitting there with his knees pulled up to his chest, in such a way that I worried I'd be bitten. He could snap like a hound, I was willing to bet.</p><p>"What do you want?" he asked me.</p><p>It was far from what I expected. He seemed <em>angry</em> with me--like a hound! My brother had told me of the logger's dog, and how its leg was hurt in the summer. He said it breathed with a <em>rage</em> if anyone came too close. It didn't yowl or growl, but come within two yalms of it and it radiated anger. No one could come near it until its leg had gotten better. I understood my brother's story, now, in meeting this boy.</p><p>"I saw you fall," I said. He made a bitter face, like he'd gotten a mouthful of gristle, then turned away from me to look at the wall ahead of him. This startled me, because I had only wanted to help him. "I thought you died," I insisted to him.</p><p>"No," he said, sounding sullen like any boy his age, and I could hardly recall that I'd thought he was shaped like a man.</p><p>He seemed fine. I'd gotten my family's wood all damp, and I'd run terribly late, all for a boy who seemed just fine. If anyone deserved the snap of a hound, I thought, it was him. "You've <em>bled,</em>" I said, insistent again, because I wanted him to justify the bad luck he had given me.</p><p>He looked at me again, incredulous, as if I were speaking a mysterious tongue. As if words like these were foreign to him. "Aye." He pressed the heel of his palm to his hair, right behind his ear, indelicate in his own touch, then pulled it away to look at it. There was just a little red smear. "Still am. Not too much."</p><p>So I was going to get walloped for being so late and for bringing home damp wood for our hearth, and all for naught at that. I didn't feel frightened for him anymore. I was just cross. I stood straight up, looking down to where he sat, feeling bigger and better than him all over again. "You ought to grow up, you know that?" I said. (I was hardly a boy.) "Playing make believe dragoon, clambering about, then falling on your gourd without a care? I'd be ashamed if I bollixed myself up like that and a bloke were watching off to the side. I'd be bowing my head!" And I turned on my heel and ran home to get my walloping over and done.</p><p>Later on I supposed I was still the lesser of two boys, because if I feared shame over death, he feared neither. But when I went back another day, of course he wasn't there, and neither was his blood over the snow. It had probably been lapped up by dogs. </p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>